'primitive' state of human musical sense can have been.

When we listen to the music of far peoples, of 'primitive' tribes, we have to appreciate that their music has had as long to develop as Beethoven, and much longer than jazz. Like the amoeba or the chimpanzee, their music is contemporary with us, not ancestral, though it sounds primitive, just as they look primitive. And we wonder whether we are listening for the right things in the right way. It is tempting to think that popular music, going for instant appeal, might illuminate whatever inner structure of our brains 'fits', and is satisfied by, a musical theme. If we were orthodox geneticists, we might have said 'genes for music' there. But we didn't.

In recent years, neuroscientists have developed techniques that allow us to look at what brains do when we carry out various actions. In particular, they reveal which bits of brain are active when we enjoy music. At the moment, with the terribly poor spatial and temporal resolution that we get from MRI and PET scans, all we can see is that music excites the right side of the brain. If we are familiar with the music, then the brain's memory-regions turn on, and if we analyse it or try to pick up the lyrics, then the verbal-analysis parts light up. And opera picks up both of them, which could be why Jack likes it: he enjoys having his brain put through a blender.

Our affinity with music starts early. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that if we hear music in the womb, then it can affect our later musical preferences. Psychologists play music to babies as soon as they start kicking, and have discovered that they can categorise it, like we adults do, and into the same categories. If we play them Mozart, they stop kicking for a bit, about fifteen minutes; then they start kicking again, perhaps with some relation to the rhythm. The evidence is claimed, but it isn't very persuasive. If we then continue with a different bit of Mozart, or Haydn or Beethoven, then the kicking pauses, but it resumes after a minute or so. The Beatles, Stravinsky, sacred chants, or New Orleans jazz, make them pause for much longer, ten minutes or so.

Playing the same pieces months later reveals that the baby has some memory of the style as well as of the instruments. Apparently, a quartet by Mozart triggers recognition of the 'Mozart' style just as effectively as a Mozart symphony. Our brains have sophisticated music-recognition modules, and we can use them before we speak, indeed before we are born. Why?

We're looking for the essence of music -as if we knew what the essence of sex was for the Naked Ape, or the essence of obedience for Eichmann -or come to that, what it means to be the most intelligent/extelligent creature on Roundworld. What we want is a story that puts the arts, and music, into an explanation of How We Got Here, and why we waste all that money on the arts faculties of universities. Why is Rincewind so keen to bring art and music to our ancestors?

It was very common in the early years of the twentieth century to copy the music of 'primitive'

tribes. Examples include Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Manuel de Falla's Fire Dance, where the musical style was thought to give a primitive authenticity. People thought that Bronislaw Malinowski's tales of the Trobriand Islanders, with their amazing lack of the civilised sexual repressions so publicised by Freud in Viennese society, showed that Natural Humans were happier and less corrupt, and that their music -for flutes and drums -conveyed their state of innocence more effectively than classical symphonies. Jazz, invented by supposedly 'primitive'

black musicians down in New Orleans, had resonances that seemed natural, animal (and, for certain Christians, evil). It was almost as if music were a language, parallel to the words, developed in different societies with different emphases, and more revealing of the nature of the people than other aspects of their culture.

This is the way the media have played it, and like the Flintstones and Stone Age society, we have an overlay of this outlook that it's very difficult to get away from. Margaret Mead, who was taken for a ride by her native girl friend and told the resulting story in Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization, romanticised their music and dances in exactly this way.

When Hollywood needs to show the primitive-but-spiritual nature of Indian braves, cannibal tribes in Borneo, or Hawaiian indigenes, it shows us the rain dance, the marriage music, and the hula girls. When we go to these places, the locals put on these dances for us because it brings in tourist money. The complicity between muzak, hula dances, opera and background music in Hollywood films has completely buried our abilities to sort out what constitutes 'natural' art or music.

However, that's not what we want anyway. 'Natural' is an illusion. Desmond Morris made a lot of money selling paintings done by apes. The apes clearly enjoyed the whole business, and so did Morris, and presumably so did the people who bought them and looked at them in art galleries.

There is also an elephant that paints, and signs its paintings. Sort of. There's a segment of modern painting whose philosophy seems to relate to this quest for the genuinely primitive. One side is the tackiest, painting by children, which clearly demonstrates the stepwise effects of the culture -the extelligence -on their burgeoning intelligence. To our inexpert eyes, though, these paintings demonstrate only the enormous gratification achieved by some parents in response to minimal effort by their children.

Another aspect, more intellectual, is the move towards apparently real-world constraints, like cubism, or attempts to develop styles that force us to re-evaluate how we see, like Picasso's profile faces but with the two eyes on one side. There is a very common modern form that arranges rectangles of paper with different textures, or sprays sparse paint droplets according to some minimal rule, or scatters charcoal dust on a bold swirly bright oil-paint background and then combs it into the texture and pattern of the whole canvas. All of these can give pleasure to the eye. Why? How do they differ from natural objects, some of which also give considerable pleasure?

Now we want to make a giant leap and bring Mozart, jazz, paper-texture and charcoal-swirl oil paintings into the same frame. We think that this frame naturally includes ancient cave-paintings, which we know to be early, so have more claim to being genuinely primitive, if we could only look at them with the eyes and minds of viewers contemporary with the artist. The same problem occurs with Shakespeare, too: we no longer have the ears or minds - the extelligence - of the first Elizabethan age.

We have to be more than a bit scientific here. We have to consider how we perceive light, sound, touch -what our sense organs tell us. For a start, they don't, and this is the first lesson. In his book Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett is very critical of the Cartesian Theatre67 picture of consciousness. In this picture, we imagine ourselves sitting in a little theatre in our minds, where our eyes and ears pipe in pictures and sounds from the outside world. In school we all learned that the eye is like a camera, and that a picture of the world is imaged in the plane of the retina, as if that was the difficult bit. No, the difficult bit starts there, with different elements of that picture taking different routes into different parts of the brain.

When you see a moving red bus, the features 'moving', 'red' and 'bus' are separated fairly early in the brain's analysis of the scene ... and they don't just get put together again to synthesise your mental picture. Instead, your picture is synthesised from lots of clues, lots of bits, and nearly all of what you 'see' as you look around the room is only 'there' in your brain. It's not at all like a TV